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In online learning, the high dropout ratio is a serious problem and reflects a poor level of motivation in e-learning programmes. Social-interactive engagement may greatly affect users' attitudes and choices in many fields; among these, online learning is inevitably impacted by factors such as social connections. To study the impact of social-interactive engagement on the dropout ratio and learning progress, iMOOC was employed as the study object using data from 619 courses and 2,071,147 learners, as well as 19,451,428 learning records. As engagement is a process of collecting experiences, the learner's experience plays a significant role in reducing the dropout ratio. Social-interactive engagement helps to reduce the dropout ratio; thus, learners should be encouraged to engage in online activities, such as discussions, note sharing, commenting and Q&A, to alleviate the feelings of being disconnected and isolated. Through an empirical study, we also find that the longer a learner's registered time is, the lower the dropout ratio. From the perspective of the courses themselves, the dropout ratios of shorter or more difficult courses are lower than those of longer or less-difficult courses. This paper provides theoretical and practical recommendations for reducing the dropout ratio in online learning and improving learning efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated 150 university lecturers from the perspective of their emotional labour, focusing on the effect of a playful climate on lecturers' innovation intention and job engagement. A structural equation model analysis determined the following: is positively related to lecturers' strategies of deep acting and expression of natural emotions, but its effect on surface action is not significant; deep acting partially mediates between university playfulness climate and innovation intention, and the expression of natural emotions partially mediates between university playfulness climate and job engagement. This study expands our knowledge regarding the effect of emotional labour on lecturers' individual positive performance and enriches our understanding of the effect of playfulness climate on teaching activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses an integrated pedagogical tool for knowledge learning as an on-line tool for flipped classroom activities and as an off-line capability training tool. Theoretically, the Experiential Learning Cycle (ELC) plays a critical role in promoting students learning effectiveness and performance. However, a dearth of research has applied M-learning and flipped classroom in combination with the ELC stages such as concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation to examine the knowledge and ability learning outcomes for students. This study integrates the On line to Off line (O2O) classroom development and usage derived from the four stages of ELC based on on-line knowledge learning and off-line ability training in Microeconomics courses. The results revealed significant improvements in students learning outcomes after O2O mode was implemented. In comparison with traditional teaching methods, not only does O2O teaching significantly improve the students' learning result of professional knowledge, but O2O teaching also significantly enhanced the capabilities of the students. Furthermore, this study reports the findings from major activities of each ELC stage in O2O classroom practice along with the mapping of on-line learning and off-line training included in the aforementioned stages. Finally, the study provides pedagogical implications and future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship has been regarded as a new science in the promotion of economic development, which has led to rapid development in entrepreneurship education. The growing number of students enrolled in entrepreneurship programs creates unprecedented challenges on educators. Although multiple teaching and learning activities are adopted in entrepreneurship education, these are mainly carried out using traditional classroom lectures, case studies and group discussions. Nowadays, information & communication technology (ICT) is used to enhance the effectiveness of traditional teaching methods and competency training. PowToon is a web-based ICT tool that hat allows teachers and students to quickly and easily create animated presentations. Using quasi-experimental design and qualitative method, this study is to examine whether PowToon is an effective tool for business plan presentation. The study find that the animated presentations attracted more investment than the groups that did not prepare animated videos. It reflects that developed videos which helps entrepreneurial team to better deliver their business ideas to investors in a well-thought out way. In addition, the results of the study show that individuals who generate a business idea did not necessarily significantly influence their investment decisions. Our findings challenge the concept on self-biases evaluations of the economic potential of their own business ideas. Finally, the students were very willing to adopt new ways of delivering their business ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disruptive innovation has created a significant impact on management practices and academia. This study investigated the impact of existing knowledge assets on disruptive innovation by analyzing the role of knowledge embeddedness and specificity. We conducted a hierarchical regression analysis by using survey data from 173 Chinese industrial firms to test the direct and indirect effects of knowledge embeddedness and specificity on disruptive innovation, which can be divided into outward-oriented and internal-oriented disruptive innovation. The results indicated that knowledge embeddedness not only played a positive role in knowledge specificity, but also had a positive effect on outward-oriented disruptive innovation. Furthermore, knowledge specificity exhibited opposite functions in outward-oriented and internal-oriented disruptive innovation. In addition, knowledge specificity mediated the relationship between knowledge embeddedness and outward-oriented (internal-oriented) disruptive innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss the concept of a smart city based on information and communication technology (ICT), analyze the objectives of smart city development in Taiwan, and explain the supporting technologies thatmake such development possible. Subsequently, we propose a hierarchical structure framework of smart city systems with levels of complexity ranging from low to high and interconnections and interactive relationships in five dimensions: the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, Big Data, Mobile Network, and smart business. We integrate each key resource of the core operation systems of cities to promote the innovative operation of cities and further optimize city development. We then propose a Big Data platform data flow framework that uses information from ubiquitous sensor networks and information equipment to analyze the Big Data application process of smart cities and determine the resulting advantages and challenges. Additionally, we analyze the current state of development of smart cities in Taiwan. Finally, we discuss a new philosophy of smart city development and provide a practical blueprint for the formation, operation, and development of the smart cities with the aim of creating a bright future for the smart cities of Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractNowadays, numerous enterprises are actively adopting electronic performance monitoring (EPM) systems with the goal of enhancing organizational performance by stimulating employee proactive behavior. However, some companies have reported that the EPM system didn't achieve the expected results and even led to the opposite. To address this paradoxical phenomenon, we employed psychological reactance theory to investigate the impacts of employee differentiate perceptions of EPM (developmental EPM [DEPM] and preventive EPM [PEPM]) on individual psychological and behavior reactance. By conducting a three-wave survey questionnaire among 446 corporate employees, we find that DEPM facilitates proactive behavior, while PEPM inhibits such behaviors; Second, psychological reactance mediates the relationships among DEPM, PEPM, and proactive behavior; Third, individual trait mindfulness positively (negatively) moderates the impact of DEPM (PEPM) on psychological reactance. This research elucidates the effects of EPM on proactive behavior, providing valuable information to support attempts to refine digitally driven monitoring models within organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovations in supply chains and logistics, which help businesses reduce their costs and meet customer needs, have become increasingly vital. In this study, we first conducted a content analysis followed by a social network analysis to systematically review 104 research papers on supply chain innovation (SCI) that were published between 1987 and 2018. The results suggest that SCI research was originally concentrated in the United States and did not receive much attention in Europe and Asia, until more recently. An analysis of collaboration networks indicates that an SCI research community has just started to form, with the United Kingdom at the center of the international collaborative network. Implications of the study and directions for future research are summarized in detail, based on the systematic literature review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of smart cities has greatly improved the living and working environment of urban residents, but whether it can enhance the happiness of urban residents is a controversial topic. In this study, we investigate residents' experiences of obtaining information, services and networks in smart cities from the aspects of safety, usefulness and convenience, and empirically explore their relationship with residents' subjective well-being (SWB). The results show that residents' safety, usefulness and convenience experiences of obtaining information, services and networks in smart cities all have positive impacts on their SWB, and the relationship between residents' safety experience and SWB is, to a certain extent, mediated by their usefulness and convenience experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past, research addressing the issues reflecting industrial needs for sustainability-related curriculum design in higher education has been limited. To narrow this gap and to provide students with better business sustainability curricula, we propose employing a mapping concept to extract the opinions and needs of industrial professionals. A total of 14 industrial professionals were invited to brainstorm on topics of business sustainability to be included in the curriculum, and we were able to obtain 52 topics. The participants were then asked to group the topics on the basis of their own perception of similarity, and rated their importance and difficulty levels. To associate the topics into clusters, we conducted multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis. We achieved five clusters: resource usage reduction and management, corporate governance and labor safety, business sustainability practices, employee rights and community involvement, and knowledge of the regulations. A derived importance–performance analysis (dIPA) was later implemented to further categorize the topics on the basis of the distinct levels of importance and difficulty of each topic. The four quadrants in dIPA could act as guidelines for designing a series of progressive courses on business sustainability in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart cities are primarily based on information and communications technology development and applications across various academic subjects and domains. Integrating new-generation information and communications technologies, including the Internet of Things data collection, cloud computation, big data applications, and mobile network, smart cities organize the people and things of a city according to application needs to perform real-time computation and processing. Information transmission must be rapid and reliable to protect personal privacy and to secure data. All types of information security problems can lead to disastrous consequences; in particular, they pose great challenges to traditional information security systems. To explore possible solutions to the challenges that Taiwan's smart city information security faces, this study used the enterprise architecture method and discussed the emphasis and investment capacity of the government and enterprises on information security. Moreover, this study reviewed correct methods of using a smart information security collaborative system to protect not only privacy, however also networks with a large attack surface; the purpose was to establish a reliable data sharing practice and alleviate the cascading effect of failures of smart networks. Finally, this paper provides future research directions for building smart cities and encouraging further explorations in this domain. It is hoped that smart cities can conduct overall planning for information security during the process of construction. Future researchers will be able to propose more effective solutions for smart city information security while developing information and communication technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social enterprises (SEs) have formed a naturally conscientious atmosphere in Taiwan, which has not only diluted the boundary between society and enterprises, but also transformed the inherent thinking of nonprofit organizations (NPOs). SEs operate under cross-organizational and cross-departmental models. For years, the rapid economic development of Taiwan has focused on the pursuit of profit without focusing on the development of NPOs. Only after the economy began to slow down did society gradually see a new trend based on the concept of SEs and the cultivation of community self-sufficiency to solve social problems. Its successful implementation is of great significance to the sustainable development of Taiwan. Community industry is based on the community and it is people-oriented. From the perspective of sustainable development, community industry is invested in economic activities and creates multiple benefits to a sustainable community and to social, environmental, cultural, financial, and other developments. From the early “production and welfare construction” to the “new hometown overall construction policy”, Taiwan has placed emphasis on inherent local industry activation, such as the establishment of local industrial exchange centers, local industry sustainable mechanism construction, local characteristic small community enterprises, as well as economic plans, including “Sustainable Employment Hope Project” and “Diverse Employment Development Program”, promoted by the Labor Commission since 2001. All of these are focused on building and developing a community industry, and relevant authorities look forward to the vitality of the community industry to create more job opportunities and community interests. Based on literature review of social enterprise, this paper leads small- and medium-sized community industries to meet the development of business models from the economic perspective of commercialization and the social perspective of social innovation in order to solve the quality crisis that is faced by nonprofit organizations and to maintain the sustainable development of the enterprise. By the design of a nonprofit and mutual-assistance mechanism, poverty relief results can be obtained. SEs, which are similar to regular enterprises, can encounter challenging business environments and they must also possess the ability to assume business risks. Specifically, SEs must consider the dual goals of having a social mission while achieving economic goals. This study provides a detailed understanding of the existence and operational characteristics of SEs in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the information communication and investment of crowdfunding campaigns are usually accomplished online, online crowdfunding theoretically breaks the limitation of space. However, investors’ behaviors still show significant home bias; furthermore, from a dynamic view, the changes in home bias during the funding duration reflect the investment preference. This paper studies the dynamics of home bias in crowdfunding investment as well as the distance diffusion of home bias in the crowdfunding market through data mining and econometric models. The distance between investors and founders gradually increases from 3605 km to 4229 km as the funding progresses, and home bias shows different diffusion patterns between categories. For most of the campaigns, the distance between backers and founders of the successful campaigns is always greater than that of the failed ones; thus, the distance diffusion impacts the pledge results. However, the study also finds that for some categories, home bias does not play a positive role in investment or that it even shows negative impacts, among which food and technology are two extreme categories. The study provides a theoretical basis from the perspective of user behavior to analyze online investment and to improve the promotion of crowdfunding campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To analyze the directions for future research suggested and to project future research plans, we extract relevant text from these publications with respect to COVID-19-related research based on 54,136 relevant academic journals published from the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in January 2020 until December 2020. First, we extract and preprocess the corpus and then determine that, according to the Elbow method, the optimal number of clusters is 7. Then, we construct a text clustering model based on an autoencoder, with the support of an artificial neural network. Distance measurements, such as correlation, cosine, Braycurtis, and Jaccard are compared, and the clustering results are evaluated with normal mutual information. The results show that cosine similarity has the best effect on clustering of COVID-19-related documents. A topic model analysis shows that the directions of future research can mainly be grouped into the following seven categories: infectivity testing, genome analysis, vaccine testing, diagnosis and infection characteristics, pandemic management, nursing care, and clinical testing. Among them, the topics of pandemic management, diagnosis and infection characteristics, and clinical testing trended upward in proportion to future directions. The topic of vaccine testing remains steady over the observation window, whereas other topics (infectivity testing, genome analysis, and nursing care) slowly trended downward. Among all the topics, medical research comprises 80%, and about 20% of the topics are related to public management, government functions, and economic development. This study enriches our scientific understanding of COVID-19 and helps us to effectively predict future scientific research output on COVID-19., Competing Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article., (© The Author(s) 2023.)